September 12, 2006: a new Sepultura record lands on store shelves across the US, the band's name stamped across the cover in jagged metal lettering. The Best of Sepultura promises a career retrospective, a gateway for listeners who missed the Brazilian quartet's rise. But no one from the band stood at a release party that day. No press release quoted Andreas Kisser or Igor Cavalera. The album arrived like a ghost with a familiar face, assembled entirely without the group's knowledge or consent.
That ghost wore Roadrunner's colors. The label released The Best of Sepultura on September 12, 2006, two decades after the band's major-label debut. By that point Sepultura had long left Roadrunner and were contracted to SPV Records. The compilation focused on singles from 1991–1996, the stretch when Max Cavalera still fronted the band and Roadrunner held the master tapes. Twenty years on, in 2026, the release remains a strange artifact: an unauthorized greatest-hits package from a label that no longer represented the band it was selling.
A release without consent
Sepultura never recognized the album. The official line from the band was silence, and that silence said enough. Roadrunner owned recordings from Morbid Visions through Roots, but the label's rights didn't extend to the band's blessing. When The Best of Sepultura appeared, it did so alongside similar unsanctioned compilations for Type O Negative, Fear Factory, and Ill Niño — a batch of catalog mining timed to squeeze revenue from acts whose relationships with the label had ended.
The tracklist tells a peculiar story. Roadrunner selected heavily from the Arise, Chaos A.D., and Roots era, the period when Sepultura became one of the most important metal bands on the planet. But the compilation skips Morbid Visions, Against, and Nation entirely. The debut EP Bestial Devastation is absent too, as are the live and rarities collections Blood-Rooted, The Roots of Sepultura, and Under a Pale Grey Sky. What remains is a curated version of Sepultura, cut to fit a commercial narrative.
One substitution reveals how casually the project was treated. The compilation replaces 'Under Siege (Regnum Irae)' with 'Desperate Cry' from Arise. The swap makes little sense musically — both are standout tracks from the same album. But it suggests a licensing quirk or a last-minute decision made without the band's input. Similarly, the version of 'Troops of Doom' included on The Best of Sepultura does not come from Morbid Visions, the album where the song first appeared. Instead, the compilation uses a later recording, muddying the very history it claims to document.
Credits from a past lineup
The credits read like a séance. Max Cavalera is listed on vocals and rhythm guitar, and he also handled bass across Schizophrenia, Beneath the Remains, Arise, and Chaos A.D. Andreas Kisser appears as solo guitarist and, intriguingly, as bassist on those same four albums. Paulo Pinto is credited on bass for Roots, while Igor Cavalera sits behind the drums. It is a lineup frozen in amber, a document of the classic Sepultura configuration that had fractured years before this compilation existed.
For a band that built its name on confrontation, the unauthorized compilation was a strange kind of tribute. Sepultura had spent the 1990s breaking down barriers between thrash metal, groove metal, and the indigenous rhythms of Brazil. By 2006, the group was deep into its post-Cavalera chapter with Derrick Green on vocals. Roadrunner's decision to ignore that current incarnation and instead package the Max-era singles as 'the best of' spoke to the label's commercial priorities — and to the enduring shadow of the band's most celebrated period.
The industry context of 2006
The album's release also highlighted a fundamental tension in the music industry of the mid-2000s. Labels held vast catalogs of recordings, and as physical sales declined, compilation albums became a low-cost way to monetize those assets. A band's consent was not always required if the label owned the masters. The Best of Sepultura stands as a case study in this practice: a product that carried the name of a band that had no say in its creation, released on the same day as similar packages for other Roadrunner alumni.
Two decades later, the compilation remains a footnote in Sepultura's discography, unlisted on the band's official pages and ignored by the members who made the music it contains. The cover promises the best of Sepultura, but the band itself would point elsewhere — to the albums they actually crafted, to the records made after Roadrunner, to the live shows where the real legacy lives. The ghost that appeared on September 12, 2006, still haunts the bargain bins and streaming playlists, a reminder that sometimes the name on the cover is not the same as the story inside.
And that September morning in 2006? No one from Sepultura woke up to celebrate. The album simply existed, a product of contract law and catalog rights. Twenty years later, the date passes again with the same silence from the band. The Best of Sepultura remains what it always was: a compilation of great songs assembled by people who no longer had the right to speak for the band — but still owned the tapes.